7 Things People never tell you about startups

Working in startup is fun. The office is cool and fresh. The people are young, fun, full of energy and youth. The boss is almost your age and you get to wear anything you want. And since startups generally are a team of 5-30 people, there’s a particular responsibility trusted with you. So after wasting years in your college degree, you get to feel useful after a long time.

As per a survey by Economic Times in 2016, Finance Ministry listed 19000 consumer Internet and financial services startups. It means there are 19,000 different ecosystems breathing, surviving, and struggling to evolve. Working somewhere in an one-room apartment or somebody’s basement/garage, the fate of these ecosystems is solely determined by the people who work in them.

There are multiple positives about working in startups, like challenges, all round development, people, atmosphere and the aura around. On good days working in startups are like working on a college project with your college buddies.

However, when the challenges never seem to stop, when you are actually bored with all the all-round development that your organization can provide, when your colleagues are who you see everyday and when the atmosphere and aura around feels same, you start questioning things around you. You start questioning yourself. And that my friends is the dichotomy of worklife.

Working in a startup is one of those experiences that actually prepare you for organizational hardships and propel you towards entrepreneurship. But the road through startups are not at all easy. It’s a new challenge everyday, it might feel good initially but it keeps on getting daunting when you realize you are not being appreciated enough, either by the world or your organization, so here are 7 things nobody tells you about working in startups.

Nobody has ever heard about your company

And not even you before you joined the venture. Chances are, you got to know from those late nights job hunting where you landed on a half built website with dilute content and incomplete SEO. You loved their product or they had just the right opening you had been searching your lifetime for, so you decide to give it a shot and abracadabra, there you are, in one corner of your office, heading a department alone. Figuring a way out of some problem for your company.

Parents and relatives and friends and teachers and every random person on social media asks where you work and stumble for a moment, you try to choose a best answers from the list of answers you have heard your sales team give to their clients, but you go with the most basic one because you are one self-confident rude motherfucker, “I work for company_name, it’s a startup in industry_name” If the person at the other end is smart, (s)he would understand, but the world is full of bicthes being bitches, and some people keep on digging the information about you company out of you as if there’s no google tab on their phone. And that my friends, hurt.

Your HR is also a fresher

Who is that one person you can reach out to for inconvenience you face in your office. The Human Resource Department, the HR. But hey, you’re in a bloody startup and there be no HR in startup, nigga. And even there is a person who is called HR more times than their actual name, they are also one of those who came to know about the company from those late nights job hunting and (s)he is also a fresher. That means a total noob. HR is a profile no college or degree can teach you about and the ease and sophisticated nature comes through initial guidance and years of experience. So yeah, that is another corner startups get short of. Their never ending focus to make their product better and visible in the market gives them a blind eye towards departments like HR. And that my friends, hurt.

You could end up in a profile you were not hired for

That happens every time. Every Single Time. Especially to fresher’s. That, in most cases are good for the candidate but in cases it is not, it hurts you every day to sit in a chair and do the job you never asked yourself to commit for. The days get longer and your corporate experience begins to die. If you get a way out, you go out. But what if you are a fresher who went for a profile but are doing something totally different- how do you get out then, your experience letter and your actual experience keeps on getting distant from each other. So on days when you realize this- you sulk in chair, shut your laptop down, lean back and regret.

The hopping of projects might get to you

Startups are fast. Very fast. Experiments are frequent and application is quick. You try something, it works- you replicate it to other processes. You get something else that works, you replicate that too, you see something that hurts, you take it out from every process. SO there are new projects, every alternate week. One week you are working on the optimization of a web page, next thing you know, you are in a room full of bloggers for backlinks and off page branding.

You never know, what you will be paid next month

It all depends on the revenue of your company. And I’m not talking about settled startups, I’m talking about the ones still struggling, trying to make their way into the market. So if you have joined a startup which is still in infant stage, I can make three assumptions about you.

You like their product.

You like their business model.

You like the people working there.

If any one of the listed assumptions are true, you have made a sober decision of growing with the company. And that includes not getting a fixed sum every first of the month.

Your parents won’t be able to brag about you

You know that you enjoy working in your organization in-spite of all the hiccups. You enjoy spending time there and you would love to discuss ideas outside of work too. But how do you explain this to your parents? How do they explain this to their friends? You can’t. They can’t.

So you stay invisible in the market just like your company. Lost in the crowd of hundred others trying to get their product onboard. But it all is a sweet pain that you actually enjoy and it helps you focus more on the project.

You might have to explain your profile to people

What do you do on weekends? Do you find yourself at a club trying to explain what you actually do for a living and what does your profile and your company deals with. Welcome to the underrated world of startups. You are already living a story.

But c’mon startups aren’t that bad either. They really help solve equations of life everyday. You get to learn about content, SEO, sales, Coding, Affiliate Marketing, Marketing, Data Mining, Business and shit load of other corporate techniques. See, that is the beauty of a startup. Everything they throw at you, it becomes an experience for you. And you walk out of that office, a more learned person everyday.